While reading Wade Davis’ “The Wayfinders” I was stopped in my tracks when I read about the descendants of an ancient civilization known as the Tairona in South America. It seems that and I quote “ What is important, what has ultimate value, what gives life purpose is not what is measured and seen but what exists in the realm of Aluna, the abstract dimension of meaning.” This world Aluna is the unseen spirit or life force that moves through the earth and their world. One can imagine this as an earth born version of Avatar with everything being alive and having meaning. It’s almost as if it were a shadow world existing in our own that the native people still are in touch with and revere. Perhaps we also have such a world of meaning unrelated to the one we live in. We call ours Facebook.

Years ago I sang in the choir at a synagogue in Long Island NY and as a part of that I listened to a lot of sermons. One of the things that I really struck me was the holiness of the Torah, not just what it said but the book itself. In one sermon the rabbi spoke how at one point the word was considered too powerful, a rope was tied round the waist of the rabbi as he went into the holiest part of the temple, where the Torah scrolls were kept as the power of the words and information in the Torah might knock him senseless. With the recent cyber attracts hopefully we will once again to understand the power of information that we have come to regard with such little worth. Now we seem to realize that information has the power to make or destroy us and that we should treat it with respect. Perhaps that is the journey of western civilization, we seem to make an art of making the sacred profane, moving value to an ever more shifting goal.